Collaborative Microbial Metabolite Center

Project Summary/Abstract The interaction between our diet, metabolism by the microbiome, and the downstream biological effects on the host are key foundational knowledge that will guide the development of precision medicine integrated with nutrition. To characterize the function of these individual metabolites that are transformed from foods or fully synthesized by the microbiome will improve the mechanistic understanding of Microbe-Diet-Host interactions. Despite this importance, the community lacks a knowledge management center that centralizes and aggregates bioactivity and function of these metabolites that hinders the ability of researchers to reuse knowledge in a high throughput fashion and build off the discoveries of others. The proposed “Collaborative Microbial Metabolite Center” or CMMC proposed here will fill this void in the scientific landscape, aiming to integrate microbial metabolite discovery and activity from PAR-21-253 grantees and the broader microbial metabolomics community. The CMMC will build a centralized microbial metabolites bioactivity knowledge base that aims to work with the grantees and community to define standards to represent bioactivity, handle community depositions of knowledge and supporting raw data, aggregate depositions into corroborated knowledge, apply knowledge to new data, propagate knowledge into previous uncharacterized molecules, and integrate with other community knowledgebases that host complementary knowledge for microbial metabolites. All data, knowledge, and tools will be made findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). This proposal will 1) Build the web portal for microbial metabolites with search, export, and analysis functions. 2) Build a microbial metabolite knowledgebase with the accompanying R01 grantees, NIDDK, and the larger scientific community. 3) Coordinate data sharing activities, training and technical support and organize a yearly meeting. The PIs and Co-Is are well suited to address the needs and build the proposed knowledge base, due to their expertise in microbial metabolomics (Dorrestein), microbiome (Dorrestein, Knight), knowledge base creation (Dorrestein, Wang, Knight, Bandeira), community outreach (Dorrestein, Wang), platform training (Dorrestein, Wang), community tool integration (Wang), community knowledgebase integration (Dorrestein, Wang, Knight, Bandeira), scalable tool development (Wang, Bandeira), and data resiliency (Wang, Bandeira).